Beacon LightShares Testimony, Talks New Album & Racial Tension

Beacon Light started releasing music in 2010, and says that the motivation behind his music is to impact people.

“I was raised in a Christian home. I went to an urban Christian school called The Potter’s House where I was surrounded by diversity since a young age.”

When he was in third grade, he was molested for the first time by a family member. That continued for five more years. When he was a teenager, his parents were divorced. Such happenings led to him not wanting to follow Jesus; Beacon Light says that he was always mad at God and the hypocrisy that he saw among Christians.

At age nineteen, he realized that trying to get through life on his own, without God, did not fulfill him. “I called on Him and He kind of stepped in and I began to follow Jesus and get healed by the abuse.” He details this story in his song “Jesus Loves Me.”

Beacon Light started freestyling in high school and discovered that he had a talent for it.

“I used music in the wrong way though. It was all about me and when I came to Christ when I was nineteen I gave up rapping.”

He felt so bad about how he had abused the ability to rap that he stopped, but picked it up again six to eight months later after feeling like God wanted him to make hip-hop music that could impact people who need Jesus.

Since then Beacon Light has released three albums, and his newest project, Lit, makes it four. Lit’s concept goes along the lines of

“If God is moving inside of you powerfully, you should be able to see something on the outside change.”

To record this album, Beacon Light would get into a studio with a producer who would make beats while he made samples of different sounds. “Whatever [production] inspires me to write, that’s what I write to.” He started with about thirty beat loops and ended up with eight songs.

“Haters” was the first single from Lit and was produced by B-Coe. Beacon Light says that “Haters” had a very similar temple to Swoope’s 2014 hit “Same Team” and actually wrote the hook while listening to that song’s instrumentals. He says that he will choose to love whoever hates him, instead of returning hate back towards them.

“You can feel me choosing to love my haters but it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do.”

"O LORD” is a song that Beacon Light made to worship God through. In some Bible versions, LORD, in all capital letters, is used to replace Yahweh, the word that the Jewish people believed was too holy to speak, which means "I Am."

“For me, it’s like I’m calling on the name of the Lord even as I’m rapping.”

“Falling” is the seventh track on Lit and is talking about the hardship of falling back into a sin you have been trying to avoid. “When you slip up, when you dishonor God, when you let God down, it’s kind of like a thought of ‘I can’t keep doing this. I don’t want to keep doing this.’” It contrasts the battle of sin with a feeling of floating, as if without gravity, where you are free from your temptation and cannot fall.

The final song of Lit is called “Quite Like Me” and features a close friend, Steven Malcolm.

“'Quite Like Me' is really just about being yourself. There’s no one that is made quite like you and because of that you have a purpose and a unique call on your life.”

Beacon Light says that no matter what others tell you to be like, it is important to be happy being yourself. If a listener only had time to listen to three songs on Beacon Light's album, he would want them to hear “Haters,” “The Drop,” and “O LORD.”

Beacon Light and his fellow Infinity Music Group members are part of a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan called The Edge. Edge is an acronym standing for “Evangelism, Discipleship, Growth, and Empowerment.” He says that it is an urban hip-hop church.

“Our focus is obviously on Christ but hip-hop is our culture.”

“It’s really cool man. It’s just a come-as-you-are church. We love God and worship through hip-hop and rap music.” Beacon Light says that many people come to church wearing “hip-hop clothing” and that there is graffiti around the church.

In Spring 2015 Beacon Light released a song called “Color Blind” a response to racism. The song references “The Giver,” a 1993 novel that was made into a movie in 2014. He says that there is a kid who lives in a supposedly utopian society where the past is blocked out. The kid sees in black and white, grayscale, “and as he starts to grow and develop he starts to see in full color and it opens his eyes.”

Beacon Light says that in the song, he imagines what life would be like if people saw in grayscale. Everything would be dull and there would be no diversity, at least in terms of color.

“You look out and see flowers and the grass. What if they were all gray? I was imagining that as being what racism is. Racism really takes away from seeing the beauty in the differences that God created us in, because God did make us different [from each other].”

The song talks about how different the world would be if there was no diversity and hopes that God will heal racial tensions. Beacon Light says that the most powerful thing a person can do to stop racism is to have friendships with a diversity of people.

This fall, Beacon Light hopes to tour and says that when he goes on tour, he gets the reward of seeing how his music impacts listeners.

“I’ve seen so many people come up and be really deeply moved by [“Jesus Loves Me”] and relating to being abused when they were younger, the divorce thing, and watching God heal people.”